Ada Lovelace Day (Part 1)

Today is Ada Lovelace day; a day for
reflection on the awesome contributions of women to science and technology.
Today, I would like to pay tribute to some of my personal heroines, and as
you’ll see, there’s quite a few of them. I’ve tried to list them in roughly
chronological order.

Dr Katherine Phelps
In my early teens I had a Commodore 64 with a 1200/75 baud modem, which
I used to access local bulletin board systems (BBSes). This was the start of what
I would discover was a lifelong joy of communicating with people from
behind the safety of a monitor, or in the case of the C64, a
television.

Katherine, and her husband Andrew, ran one such local BBS called the
Rainbow Connection, and I met them both at a BBS meet-up. Katherine seems
to have a knack for encouraging younger people to excel, and taught me the basics
of HTML, and even had me editing web-pages for Glass Wings and other websites.
In fact, it’s due to Katherine that I got my first exposure to the Internet
and Internet programming.

Today, Katherine is still prominent in the fields of storytelling,
interactive fiction, game-writing, and comedy. Katherine is almost
wholly responsible for me getting into Japanese Animation, by
showing me an nth generation, unsubtitled, videotape of
My
Neighbour Totoro, with herself and Andrew providing a very
amusing translation as we watched. ;)

Kirrily ‘Skud’ Robert (@Skud)
I met Skud though Katherine, also while I was still at high school.
At the time I was living with my parents as a quiet, introverted
geek. All of my friends, and most of the technical people I knew,
were also quiet and introverted types.

Skud pretty much shattered all the stereotypes I had for what it
was to be technical. She was outgoing, opinionated, pushed boundries,
made things happen, was extremely good with people, had unconventional
social views, and was way cooler than me. She still is.

Skud has had a massive influence on my life. She started her own
business (Netizen) and wrote a set of course manuals on Perl. Some
years later, that same writing would form the basis of Perl Training
Australia’s own course manuals. Skud has been highly influential
in the Geek Feminism movement (which has both a blog and wiki),
and gave a critical keynote entitled standing out in the crowd at OSCON 2009.

Often I feel that whenever I discover a new experience, it’s actually something Skud has been doing for at least a decade. I still fondly remember Skud giving me advice on etiquette at a rather incredible FOSS party a few years back. In fact, etiquette is another thing Skud is rather good at. ;)

Skud continues to be one of my most favourite people in the world,
and I was delighted to have the chance to visit her in San Francisco
last year after OSCON. My personal motto, never refuse an adventure, was directly lifted from one of Skud’s new year’s resolutions.

Jacinta
Richardson (@jarichaust)
Once I got to university, I started an anime club. One year, working
behind the desk, and with my hair in pigtails and balloons, a girl
approached and asked about the club. At the end of the conversation
she said “I might come back later”, which when advertising an anime
club usually translates to: “I think you’re a complete freak, and I hope
to never see you again in my life.”

To cut a long story short, she came back, and she was studying
Software Engineering. ;)

Jacinta also does a lot of behind the scenes work which is not
easily seen. She has contacts in practically every user group in
Australia, so Jacinta is often involved when organisation of
Australian-wide events are needed. At conferences she’s often
giving up her own time to coach nervous speakers (including me!).
In fact, Jacinta even had a hand in one of my most favourite
talks of all time, @webchick’s
Women in
FLOSS.

Emily Taylor (@Domino_EQ2)
I met Emily shortly after a phone-call from Jacinta saying that I was going to have a late addition to my Perl class. Emily arrived at lunchtime, and started as a bright, attentive student; she quickly caught up with the rest of the class, showed genuine talent, and was working on advanced exercises in no time.

However what got me really excited was why Emily was learning Perl. By afternoon of the first day, I was calling back to the office to say that our new student was awesome, and she was going to apply for the position of head tradeskill developer for Everquest II (EQ2). However I think it two at least two weeks until I discovered she was in my guild!